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Archive for August, 2013

He regularly lent his baritone voice to churches around Manhattan, he studied conducting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, composition at Princeton. He went on to do arrangements for Lou Rawls and write ballets for Alvin Ailey, and Dance Theater of Harlem

If there’s one line that sums up Wagner’s Ring operas, perhaps that’s it. The Nibelung, Alberich, has had it with love and decides to ruin it for everyone else. Of course, afternoon soaps have nothing on Wagner; how Alberich’s curse works its poison only just out-paces the follies

At times, Franz Schubert was a couch surfer; he constantly ran out of money, and even depended on friends and neighbors for use of a piano. We’ve all known the type: “He’s basically a good guy. He has such incredible talent; if he could just get his life together.”

Monday at 6:00 PM, hear a recital from the Ryan Opera Center. Chicago Month on WFMT is all about synergies. Lyric Opera’s program for nurturing young singers, the Ryan Opera Center, is ripe with those: during their WFMT recital series, Ryan’s singers presented a program on the topic of “Chicago.” Composers range from Jerome Kern to Richard Rodgers

It’s Chicago Month on WFMT, and our vocal music series, Arias and Songs, is celebrating its first anniversary. In gratitude, Larry turns it back to you, the audience, and shares his special brand of insight with a compilation of listener requests—and what could be more appropriate for Chicago Month, than a program devoted to the discerning, and ever-supportive Chicago audience?

Near the end of his life, Studs Terkel marveled at the words of Carl Sandburg, a poet who mirrored his world with a kind of caustic realism; always with a heart turned toward the plight and the dignity of the common man. It was Studs who remarked that Sandburg’s words continue to ring true, 100 years after